A variety of foot splints are used in the art to provide assistance to bedfast patients who develop sores and other debilitating problems with their feet. A typical splint is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,976,059.
Foot splints of the prior art normally include an L-shaped plastic splint element which uses a padded anklet or the like with fasteners thereon to secure the splint element to the patient's foot and lower leg. These anklets are expensive to manufacture; have a limited useful life; and do not always lend themselves for ease of operation in applying the splint device to, or removal from, the patient's foot.
Conventional foot splints also have utilized stabilizer bars secured to the back of the splint element for deployment in a transverse direction from the plastic splint to maintain the attitude of the patient's foot in a predetermined position. These stabilizer bars of the prior art are normally secured to the plastic splint by their lower ends, and usually have a tightening mechanism which must be loosened and then tightened as the stabilizer bar is moved to the desired position.
It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide a foot splint which can be easily attached to or detached from the foot of a patient without the employment of the use of a conventional anklet means to envelop the foot of the patient.
A further object of this invention is to provide a foot splint with an attachment means that is less expensive to manufacture and easier to operate than the conventional anklet means of existing splints.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a foot splint which has a stabilizer bar pivotally secured to the upper portion of the foot splint to improve the leverage that it can exert on the leg of the patient when deployed in an operational position.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a stabilizer bar for a foot splint that does not need to be manually loosened and tightened as it is deployed to its operational position.
These and other objects will be apparent to those skilled in the art.